Bots, Conversational Commerce and Voice are not the answer, this is.

We’ve only ever known an internet that we went to. We’ve always thought more information is better. The internet has been built to endlessly add. The challenge for the future is navigating abundance, so maybe this is how we can rethink our relationship with information.

We’ve only known three eras of the internet.

The first was a rather pathetic unimaginative digitization of what went before. Portals like early Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite and online newspapers, mere linear translations of units of the past onto digital paper. Here as a user we went to information, but we were not in control, an editor had decided what we should see, when and how we got there. 

The second era was a paradigm shift; the search bar. Whether Ask Jeaves, Google or Bing or others, we moved to an era of search. We were now in control. Microsoft used to ask " Where do we want to go today?", this is how the internet works. What we wanted came to us when we asked. Web 2.0 allowed the internet to connect in strange new ways, but ways that put in us control, we soon found 22 browsers tabs open. 

The third has been a blending of the two, more connections, more smartness, maturation and rethinking how the internet can move beyond digital forms of information. It becomes personal. We’ve "modern day" portals and apps like Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat, Apple News that aggregate things that vast amounts of data think we would like. It's done either through of social sharing, social curation or an algorithm. We tend now to limit browser tabs and go from article to article, with slightly more shallow surfing. More next, less up.  

But what if this wasn't working?

We’ve only ever added the old to the new, never replaced. We've built on top of the old. We never designed for the internet, we pulled through the media and mental models of the past through a new frame. Newspapers never thought what should storytelling be like in the new world, they just took the units of the past.

TV companies reluctantly rendered our TV feeds into Video codecs, rather than working around new ways to discover and interact with shows people loved. 

Even VR experiences are primarily films shot with a 360 camera, not someone rethinking what happens when you as a user become the director. What is the role of sound in helping you navigate? What becomes of a narrartive when everyone see's a different film of their choosing.

In all of this we never dared make something good enough to charge for. Ad funding became the sun all businesses grew towards. Stories become Video because ads in that form are more valuable, slideshows forced more clicks, the modern web is a shrine to the need to make money from attention.

So now we’re in incremental times where every app or website now fights for more time. Every news site gives us questions for headlines, not statements, because it wants to eat more of our attention. Every video player cues up the next piece, every app taunts and tricks us with notifications, if apps were people we’d punch them in the face.

Bots, Voice, Conversational Interfaces are not the answer.

The way many expect the internet to evolve, it will be a better user interface into the same system. 

Many smart people think the new interface will be Voice. Our gateway to the new world will be the same search like bar, but accessed with mouths not fingers. 

We will navigate the new world with voice commands, asking Alexa or Siri to tell us the news, book us a Taxi, find us the next flight. The only thing about this, and it seems to go unnoticed, is that it’s a terribly crap way to do most things. If I ask Alexa to book me a Uber, I can’t see where it is. Do I want it to tell me every minute how far away it is? Will I trust it? If I want to know the next 5 flight times to Atlanta, Alexa is going to speak for 20 mins. There will of course be some use cases like driving a car, kids of course will love to find content and jokes this way but to suggest this is the future of the internet is the sign you’ve absolutely no idea how human beings work. 

Conversation Interfaces and Bots are the other big hope. That we’re going to enjoy buying shoes with a person asking me “how I am?” as the prompt line. 

Or I’m going to be so bored out of my mind that I want to have a chatbot playing the role of a cartoon character in a film. Conversational commerce is not new, we’ve been talking to sales assistants for hundreds of years, and we bloody hate it. If a picture paints a thousand words, what use is conversational commerce. I just want to see what I can get and click on it. It’s not hard people.

The clue for the next UI comes from understanding what people want now and it’s for technology to fade into the background. People want more sanity and to look at screens less. 

People want to find things they want faster, they want to make decisions more easily and quickly and to spend less time filtering out distractions. 

We’ve only ever known the internet give us more information, and to assume that more is better, we now face the reality that people need less. 

They don’t want more news, they want the right news, they don’t want to know there are 163,243 pieces written about Climate change, they want the very latest ones only.

Weather forecasts now tell us the hyperbaric pressure, the windspeed, the temperature, the direction, for 3am in the morning, when most people just need to know if they should bring the plants in if it’s frosty.

The Citibike app can show me the location of 10,000 bikes in 603 bike stations, when I just want to know if the one I use every day between 7:30am and 8am has a bike free.

The Predictive Personalized Web.

I want my phone to get smart, to know that I’ll never want the wifi to be turned on at work, while I’m in a train or driving. Why can’t it be contextually aware enough to go silent at work, and loud while I’m walking down a street? Why can’t my airline app feature on the home screen when I’m in an airport, or the subway map open as I walk into a subway station, retailers would love this. 

Every day our phones have the most intimate, personal, useful knowledge about us imaginable. As an industry we’ve assumed that privacy is something to skirt around, we encroach but try not to get caught. 

What if we started a more productive debate about maximizing value exchange, about ensuring everything was opt in, about ensuring we earned trust and were transparent. I’d love my Credit card company to know I’m in Austria so I can never worry about declined payments, I’d love my Hotel to know I’m running late, or my airline to warn my of long security lines as I appear to be behind schedule.

I want the internet to become so thin and so light in information than it becomes key contextual glances. Can my mirror turn red if the CitiBike I use every day near my apartment has no bikes available. Can my Phone text me if there are no spaces near my intended destination.

I’d love my home to warm to me as I approach it, for Alexa to not wait for me to ask it things, but to smartly suggest things to me, all I should mostly say is yes or no. "Alexa turn on the living room lights" is more annoying than just a yes to it suggesting this.

Our world is of abundance, the role of technology needs to be to help in that context, to be there but background, not a shiny thing that harasses us for attention.